[1] Hartz is best known for his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), which presented a view of the United States’s past that sought to explain its conspicuous absence of ideologies.
Hartz called them fragments because these colonies, in a sense, froze the class structure and underlying ideology prevalent in the mother country at the time of their foundation and did not experience the further evolution experienced in Europe.
Hartz spent his last years living in London, New Delhi, New York City, then Istanbul, where he died of an epileptic seizure in January 1986.
[1] The Canadian context of Hartz's fragment thesis was disseminated and elaborated upon by Gad Horowitz, in the latter’s essay "Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation" (1966).
In Australia, Hartz's fragment thesis "received respectful attention, but ... did not win assent or committed followers", according to historian John Hirst.